Fundación SGAE - Doctoral Dissertation Award

SGAE Foundation best doctoral thesis award

For a completed doctoral thesis on the subject of culture, you will receive a one-off prize of 6,000 EUR. The SGAE Foundation, which supports cultural practitioners in Spain, awards this prize once a year. The Foundation may also publish your doctoral thesis, or an extract from it, in collaboration with you. If the thesis has several authors, the sum of 6,000 EUR will be divided equally amongst them.

Who can apply

• Degree: You have a completed and approved doctoral thesis. For the 2026 round, it must have been approved after 1 January 2024.
• Topic: Your final dissertation should focus on the current cultural market in the fields of the performing arts, music, audiovisual media or multimedia in Spain or Latin America. Dissertations that draw comparisons with other countries or examine cultural exchange between Spain and Latin America will be viewed favourably.
• Field: The work must fall within one of the following fields: sociology of culture, cultural economics, cultural policy, communication and culture, cultural management or cultural law. Papers on the subject of intellectual property (copyright) are excluded, as a separate prize has been established for this topic.
• Research link: You work at a public or private research centre active in one of these fields.
• Nationality and residence: Anyone can apply, regardless of their country of origin or place of residence.
• Language: You have written your dissertation in one of Spain’s official languages: Spanish, Catalan, Basque or Galician.
• Not entered before: You have not submitted this thesis in an earlier round of the award.

How to apply

Applications must be submitted online via the SGAE Foundation’s application form. For round 2026, you can apply from 14 September until 22 October 2026 (by 23:59). A jury comprising Spanish university professors specialising in these subject areas will select the winner; their decision is final.

How realistic are your chances?

As this is a single annual prize, competition is fierce: only one final-year dissertation will be awarded the prize. Almost anyone who has recently written a final-year dissertation can apply; your chances therefore depend on how well your thesis fits the narrowly defined topic of ‘Culture in the Spanish or Latin American market’. A thesis that deals directly with the Foundation’s key areas of focus, in particular cultural exchange between Spain and Latin America, will stand out in particular.